PROCESS AND STRUCTURE IN TRADITIONAL STORYTELLING IN THE BALKANS: SOME
PRELIMINARY REMARKS

As
the comparative study of folktales began to evolve in Europe during the
early 19th century, it was obvious to researchers that the Balkans should
figure prominently in this emerging field of investigation. The strategic
geographical position of the Balkan peninsula between East and West, its
long and complex history, and the nature of its populations suggested that
folktales from the Balkans might contribute substantially to answers which
were being sought for the questions that these newly-discovered data had
raised about the history and nature of man. In one sense, these expectations
have been fulfilled time and time again during the course of the development
of folktale research in Europe; yet in another sense, they have never been
fulfilled at all. In order to understand this paradox and to comprehend its
implications for the contemporary student of Balkan studies, it is necessary
to consider the kinds of pronouncements which have been made about Balkan
folktales through time in terms of the general intellectual climate that
generated them and in terms of the broader context of European folktale
scholarship within which they have been presented.

The
study of folktales is usually said to have begun in Europe in 1812 with the
publication of the first part of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen by Jakob
and Wilhelm Grimm. Unlike most beginning dates, this one is neither so
arbitrary nor so unimportant as one might expect. No one book which appeared
in early 19th-century Europe more quickly captured the imaginations of
laymen and scholars alike, and few works which have ever been published have
been used more freely or frequently as both data base and starting place for
speculations and hypotheses about the history and nature of man.
[1] As the Grimms and their successors

1. One reason why the Grimms' work on folktales generated
so many speculations and hypotheses about the history and nature of man was
(he nature of the implications which Wilhelm Grimm drew from the story data
with which he and Jakob were concerned. For the most complete statement of
Wilhelm Grimm's position, see Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Reklam,
Leipzig, 1856), III, 427ff.

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uncovered from the written literatures of East and West what they conceived to
be countless parallels to the stories contained in the volumes of the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and as a growing number of fieldworkers began to
record what they regarded as innumerable variants of traditional story types
from the memories and mouths of peasant tale-tellers, it soon became
apparent to students of every humanistic discipline that this
rapidly-growing corpus of textual data contained important clues to unsolved
mysteries and ready proof of the validity of working hypotheses concerning
human existence and human history. [2]

In
its initial phases, the systematic study of traditional stories in Europe
was closely bound up with, and was significantly influenced by, the
development of the Romantic Movement in literature and the evolution of the
Indo-European hypothesis in linguistic studies. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the impetus and intellectual motivation for the collection
and study of folktales came from England, France, and Germany, where
prevailing philosophical notions about human history and social development
had engendered an interest in folk poetry, balladry, and mythology since the
18th century. [3]
Furthermore, it is easy to understand why the early collections and studies of
European folktales, including those from the Balkan area, were edited and
authored by writers and researchers from these three countries: it was in
England, France, and Germany that the comparative study of historical
documents and cultural data was most diligently pursued during the 19th
century, and it was the members of the intellectual communities of these
three countries by whom new data were most avidly sought and for whom
published works containing such data were obviously most often intended.
[4]

The
earliest publications of folktales from the Balkans, like those from

2. Among the most important of these were notions
concerning the primitive and conservative nature of the peasant and the
common cultural heritage of most European and Western Asiatic peoples.

3. An excellent work which traces the evolution of the
scholarly interest in folk poetry and balladry in England and assesses its
effects upon continental scholarship is Albert B. Friedman, The Ballad
Revival (Chicago, 1961).

4. A. H. Wratislaw, for example, begins his preface to
Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources (London, 1889) with a
comment which reveals his awareness of the nature of his reading audience:
"So much interest has lately been awakened in, and centered around,
Folk-lore, that it needs no apology to lay before THE BRITISH READER
additional information upon the subject" (p. iii; my emphasis).

321

the
rest of Europe, consist, for the most part, of story texts, discovered in
little-known or relatively inaccessible written sources or recorded directly
from storytellers, and translated into the native languages of their editors
and the audiences for which they had been gathered together.
[5]
Little information is provided in these early works about the individuals from
whom the field-collected stories had been obtained or about the
circumstances under which the stories had been communicated and recorded.
[6]
Editorial comments and interpretive statements tend to be relatively brief,
and they invariably reflect the theoretical biases that were prevalent in
European scholarship at the time. Stories from Balkan peoples, like
folktales recorded in other parts of Europe, are characterized as direct
manifestations and typical products of a collective 'folk mind' and hence
tend to be regarded as primary data which provide proof of, and insights
into, the simple, but idyllic, character of the peasantry and the static,
but equilibratory, nature of their way of life. Coupled with this is the
concept of Balkan tale-tellers as preservers and perpetuators of a story
tradition which presumably had its beginnings at some time in the remote
past, when the cultures of the ancestors of the majority of European and
Western Asiatic peoples were felt to have been undifferentiated. Balkan
stories, like those of kindred folk elsewhere in the Indo-European world,
are conceived by the editors of most of these early collections as cultural
artifacts which, though tarnished by time and corrupted by innumerable
retellings, survive among the peasantry of the present as living monuments
of a way of life and a world-view of an earlier era and another place. The
general similarities between folktales from Balkan countries and those from
other parts of Europe were readily apparent to editors of these early
collections; and differences, when they were discerned at all, were felt to
have little significance. "Many an old nursery favourite will be recognised
through its Greek disguise by English children when they read... this book",
wrote E. M. Geldart in the Preface to his Folk-Lore of Modern Greece: The
Tales of the People (London, 1884, p. v); and the point of view which is
implicit in this

6. This is true of all editors of early folktale
collections, of course, not simply those who edited stories from the
Balkans.

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remark is typical of that of most pioneering students of folktales from the
Balkan area. [7]

As
the comparative study of folktales attracted an increasing number of
investigators throughout Europe in the course of the 19th century, as large
quantities of new textual data became available as a result of the efforts
of library researchers and fieldworkers to provide more comprehensive and
representative historical and geographical coverage of the story tradition,
and as scholars began to develop research tools by means of which the
comparative study of tale texts could be facilitated, it was inevitable that
early speculations and assumptions about the origin and nature of folktales
would come under increasing scrutiny. The generally accepted notions that
the traditional stories of European and Western Asiatic peoples were all of
great antiquity, that the folktales of peoples whose languages were thought
to be cognate all had to have had their ultimate roots in a prehistoric
common parent culture, and that the tale corpuses of all European peasant
peoples must necessarily be similar because of the common life style and
world-view of those among whom traditional stories were still being
circulated, were subjected to re-examination, debate, and modification.
Furthermore, as the reliability of story data increased as a result of the
employment by fieldworkers of more careful and rigorous recording methods
and techniques, and as more information was made available about
storytellers and the ways in which stories were articulated and
communicated, folktale researchers began to become increasingly aware of the
fact that certain kinds of differences in folktales which early
investigators had tended to ignore or which they conceived to be relatively
unimportant (or at least less significant than similarities) would have to
be explained or accounted for in some way.

These
developments had significant effects upon European folktale

7. Throughout his book on Slavic folktales, for example,
A. H. Wratislaw (see note 4 above) makes comments such as the following:
"The Bulgarian tales themselves are curious, and some of them very
beautiful.... There are old traditions as to the world and its inhabitants,
apparently of heathen origin (No. 35); a singular fusion of the history of
Abraham and Isaac with some other, probably heathen, tradition (No. 36); a
version of 'Cinderella' (No. 37), which, involving as it does the
transmigration of souls, clearly exhibits an Indian origin; a beautiful
story (No. 38), the latter part of which is a variant of the latter part of
the Russian tale of 'Marya Morevna' (Ralston, p. 85); and No. 39, in the
latter part of which many people will recognise a variant of an old
acquaintance" (p. 176; numbers refer to the numbers of the stories included
in Wratislaw’s collection_. The many inferences which Wratislaw draw from
his data clearly indicate the speculative nature of the pronouncements made
by early editors of story collections from Balkan peoples.

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scholarship, for they called into question the very foundations upon which
this field of research had been built. For one thing, if folktales were, for
the most part, of more recent origin than had been assumed, then they could
not all have originated in the prehistoric common culture from which it was
presumed all manifestations of culture of all Indo-European peoples had been
derived. In addition, if the differences that had become increasingly
apparent in the folktales of different groups of peoples were really as
significant as they appeared to be, then this suggested that the general
similarities with which early researchers had been preoccupied might have
been more apparent than real. Consequently, a number of alternative
hypotheses came into existence to take these new discoveries into account,
each of which was based upon some prevailing concept concerning the
evolution of man or the nature and transmission of culture, but no one of
which could account for both the general and the specific kinds of
similarities and differences which researchers could discern in the growing
corpus of European folktales. Vigorous scholarly debate ensued, the result
of which was a kind of compromise which had significant effects upon the
kinds of pronouncements that were made about traditional stories of European
and Western Asiatic peoples.
[8]

The
notions which became prevalent in comparative folktale scholarship as a
result of this compromise can be characterized briefly as follows : that
most folktales — and certainly all 'complexly-structured' ones — which were
conceived to be traditional and recurrent in Europe and Western Asia had
originated in one place; that a large number, if not the majority, of them
had probably either originated in, or had been codified in the early
literary words of, India and neighboring parts of the Near East; that these
stories probably either originated or began to be disseminated no earlier
than the Middle Ages, for the most part; that the tales spread, like ripples
on a pond, outward from centers of origin or influence; and that as they
moved through time and space by means of oral transmission, they changed in
accordance with the regional, linguistic, and national boundaries which they
traversed and within which they were circulated. In terms of these notions,
the Balkan peninsula came to be regarded as an important crossroads in the
diffusion process, for stories

coming from the Near East were conceived to have entered Europe through the
Balkans and to have been disseminated from the Balkan area to other parts of
Europe. Moreover, since the Balkans were conceived to constitute a kind of
transition area between East and West, it was felt that the folktales of
Balkan peoples should be more similar to each other, to those of the Near
East, and to those of their neighboring peoples than they should be to the
traditional stories of peoples living farther from the centers of origin and
influence from which the tales had spread.

The
expected was shown to be true, as we see from a well-known essay on Modern
Greek folktales published in 1916. [9] Its author, W. R.
Halliday, notes that it comes as no surprise to the contemporary reader to
find "close parallels between Teutonic märchen and the folk-tales of
Greece", for "the same tales and the same incidents are to be found
distributed over the greater part of the world". [10] At
the same time, Halliday asserts, one can also "trace a narrower nationality
in the tone and content of a body of allied folk-stories" ; and insofar as
Greek tales are concerned, this "narrower nationality" is what Halliday
calls the "Nearer East". This area, "including Magyars, Greeks, Albanians,
Serbs, Russians, Turks, Armenians, Georgians (in fact the Turkish Empire,
Russia, and the Balkan States), presents in its folk-tales the equivalent of
its geographical position as a halfway house between East and West."
[11] Furthermore, Halliday contends, another fact is readily apparent; and
he presents it in these words :

In
ordinary conversation the Greek peasant habitually contrasts Greece with
Europe and the Hellene with the Frank, thus implicitly ranging himself among
the peoples of the Nearer East. And the admission of this casual comparison
is justified by his conditions of life and modes of thought. IT IS FURTHER
BORNE OUT BY THE CHARACTER OF HIS FOLK-TALES. The oriental and particularly
Turkish character of Greek stories has never been sufficiently recognised.
No Greek, however strong the evidence, could do anything but deny a
phenomenon, which his sense of patriotism decrees a priori to be impossible.
[12]

Halliday presents a number of general and somewhat vague
examples to support his contentions (e.g., the existence of similar words or
similar kinds of actors and agents in Greek and other Balkan or Turkish
stories) ; and his annotations to the collection of stories upon which he
focuses in

12. "The Subject-Matter of the Folk-Tales", p. 216; the
emphasis is mine.

325

his
essay (a corpus of Greek tales from Asia Minor) emphasize what he conceives
to be parallel and related stories from other Balkan and neighboring
peoples. Occasionally Halliday expresses surprise at the fact that Greek
stories do not contain certain kinds of content elements and stylistic
devices which occur in tales of nearby countries; but he invariably accounts
for these "deficiencies" by stressing the "broken-down" and "corrupt" nature
of the story texts with which he is concerned. [13] Thus,
Halliday claims that he has found close affinities between Greek folktales
and the traditional stories of other Balkan and neighboring peoples ; but
the nature of the examples which he presents suggests that these
similarities, like those which earlier investigators had found between the
folktales of Balkan peoples and those of peoples from other parts of the
Indo-European world, might have been more apparent than real.

The
scholarly notions about folktales in terms of which Halliday and others like
him were able to make the kinds of pronouncements which they made about
traditional stories from Balkan peoples have persisted among European
investigators throughout the 20th century. The appearance of Antti Aarne's
tale-type index in 1910 [14] — and of Stith Thompson's
enlargements and revisions ofthat work in 1928 and 1961 [15]
— and the development of the Finnish or historic-geographic method
[16] have facilitated the classification, indexing, and
comparative study of traditional story types. Moreover, the results which
have been obtained from the rigorous systematization of folktale data and
from the intensive comparative study of variants of individual story types
have reinforced most notions about the nature, distribution, and adaptation
of folktales and have required investigators to make only minor
modifications in others. But the widely-adopted methods of comparative
folktale study have also created some problems for which no satisfactory
solutions have yet been forthcoming. Among the most perplexing problems for
com-

13. Such qualitative statements are not uncommon among
students of folktales, many of whom have had formal training in literary
studies. Moreover, Halliday was apparently convinced that among the Greeks
living in Asia Minor, the storytelling tradition was 'dying'.

16. For a description of the Finnish or
historic-geographic method, particularly as it has been used in comparative
folktale research, see Thompson, The Folktale, pp. 428-448.

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parative folktale researchers is one which has been
created by story data from the Balkans.

The
problem, to state it simply and succinctly, is that story data from the
Balkans do not fit into the system. Most of the stories which have been
recorded in, and which have been reported from, the Balkan area cannot be
readily or easily described or characterized by means of the generalized
descriptions of widely-circulated and recurrent story types which appear in
the standard tale-type index. [17] Furthermore, even when
stories which have been reported from Balkan peoples appear to have some
characteristics commonly found in variants of well-known tale types, they
also usually differ in such significant ways that they cannot be classified
as variants of these tale types without considerable difficulty or
arbitrariness. Finally — and perhaps most importantly — stories from the
Balkans, whether they be conceived to be variants of well-known tale types,
on the one hand, or stories which have been reported from no other part of
Europe or Western Asia, are neither so recurrent among Balkan peoples
generally nor even among peoples living in any given area of the Balkans as
to enable researchers to consider them to be either tale types which are
unique to a region, culture, or nation, or regional, cultural, or national
sub-types of more widely-distributed tale-types.

That
these facts are both real and apparent has been obvious for some time. And
they have created a dilemma for the comparative folktale researcher, for
they seem to contradict what he has come to expect. Since folktales from the
Balkan area are conceived to constitute an important part of a story
tradition common to all or most peoples of Europe and Western Asia, then it
would seem that widely-circulated and recurrent tales which have been
reported in large numbers of variant forms from other parts of this vast
tradition area should be better known and should have been reported with
much greater relative frequency from the Balkans than the data seem to
indicate. Furthermore, when familiar stories are reported from the Balkans,
one would expect them to exhibit a greater number of similarities to, and a
lesser number of significant differences from, variants of these story types
that are known from elsewhere. Finally, the stories which have been reported
from Balkan peoples should have, one would think, many more parallels or
variants both from within and from outside the Balkans than the data seem to
suggest they have. But the data have fulfilled none of these expectations;
and researchers have responded to the resulting dilemma

by
seeking its solution in the Stereotypie concept of the Balkans as a 'melting
pot' [18] in which peoples of diverse cultures and
nationalities have intermingled for so long that the result has been the
formation of a kind of conglomerate culture area of which Balkan folktales
are but one manifestation.

In
terms of this concept, comparative folktale researchers have come to view
traditional tales from the Balkan area as 'composites' — that is, as stories
which are made up of a number of content elements or motifs which are well
known from folktales of other groups of European and Western Asiatic
peoples, but which do not occur in Balkan stories in the combinations in
which they occur in tales elsewhere and which do not even occur within the
corpus of Balkan folktales with the predictable consistency and frequency
which investigators have discovered in folktales from other regions,
linguistic areas, cultures, and nations. Thus, stories reported from Balkan
peoples have come to be regarded, in this sense, as variants of combinations
of well-known tale-types ; and many of these 'composite' stories have been
assigned new or supplemental tale-type numbers so that they can be
incorporated, if only in a token way, into the standard folktale index and
hence into the system to which they are so ill-fitted. [19]

One
consequence of these developments is readily apparent from the kind of
treatment that the stories of Balkan peoples receive in the standard work on
the folktale by Stith Thompson. [20] In that work,
Thompson notes that there is "an unmistakable historical connection among
the traditional narratives of all the peoples extending from Ireland to
India".
[21] Moreover, within this vast story tradition area,
Thompson asserts, a number of "sub-areas" can also be discerned,

for
affinities in language, consciousness of a common historic past as a
recognized tribe or nation, religious unity, and association in a definite
geographic

18. One comparative folktale scholar has used this
precise term in her characterization of Balkan stories: "The Balkans have
proved a melting pot for the Oriental and the Slavonic traditions, and it is
well-nigh impossible to classify particular variants as members of the South
Slavonic, Near Eastern or native Balkan traditions" (Anna Birgitta Rooth,
The Cinderella Cycle, Lund [1951], p. 213).

19. Among the Balkan stories which have been fitted into
the tale-type system in this way are the following: 300A*, The Princess
is Won, reported from Rumania; 302A* (no title), reported from Greece;
332A*,
Visit in the House of the Dead, reported from Rumania and Greece; and
409A, The Girl as Goat (Jackdaw), reported from Serbocroatia and
Greece. In all such instances, these tale types are described as being
'mixed with' other types, which simply means that they contain motifs that
are found

territory, all have tended to produce within peoples of certain regions a
psychological unity very important for its influence on their traditional
lore. [22]

In
the list of sub-areas which Thompson delineates, however, the Balkans as
such receive no mention, despite the fact that the Balkan region appears to
meet all of the criteria necessary for inclusion. Moreover, Thompson says
nothing about the story traditions of Greece, Albania, and Rumania; and
although he includes all other Balkan peoples under the sub-area which he
designates as "the Slavic countries", Thompson qualifies this designation
with the following assertions :

The
South and West Slavic peoples — the Bulgarians, the Serbo-Croatians, the
Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles — have tales resembling in many ways those of
Russia, but also greatly influenced by their neighbors farther to the south
and west. Bulgaria is thus marginal between Russia and Greece, and one finds
plentiful Italian influence in Serbia, and many German elements in the tales
of Bohemia and Poland. [23]

Thus,
one never really knows from Thompson's survey just where the stories of
Balkan peoples belong in the vast tradition area which extends from Ireland
to India; and he can only conclude from Thompson's statements that since the
tales reported from the Balkans in general or from any given group of Balkan
peoples have so much in common, and yet at the same time so little in
common, with each other, with the tales of the peoples of the rest of
Europe, and with stories from Western Asia, then neither Balkan folktales
nor the folktales of any given group of Balkan peoples can be said to have
either distinguishing or distinctive characteristics of their own.

This
conclusion is the one which most comparative folktale researchers have
reached as a result of their examination of story data from the Balkans; and
it is the only defensible conclusion which one CAN draw from the data in
terms of the system within which these data have been, and continue to be,
examined. But this is a negative conclusion, and it suggests that meaningful
studies of the stories of Balkan peoples cannot be conducted by comparative
investigators (1) until and unless new data reveal greater consistencies and
suggest closer affinities than are apparent in the existing data, or (2)
until and unless the prevailing system utilized in comparative folktale
research can be modified in such a way as to accommodate story data from the
Balkans more satisfactorily than it can at present. There is, however,
something else that is suggested by the negative nature of this conclusion,
and it is that perhaps story data

from
the Balkan area cannot be studied in terms of the same system or even the
same KIND of system within which story data from other parts of Europe have
been studied successfully. In other words, what this negative conclusion
suggests is that comparative folktale researchers may be unable to find in
Balkan story data that they think they SHOULD be able to find because it
simply does not exist in these data. Let us consider this latter possibility
further.

The
basic premise upon which the widely-used tale-type system is built is that
STORIES are traditional — that is, that there are stories which are told
over and over again by people and that as these stories are told and retold,
they are changed or modified, sometimes accidentally and sometimes
deliberately, but that in the process of being transmitted the basic plots
and motifs of these stories remain stable enough so that once one has been
exposed to these stories, he will recognize them when he is exposed to them
again, even though he might be able to detect what he conceives to be
additions, omissions, or modifications. Myriad stories can be said to be
'traditional' in this sense; and many stories can be said to be traditional
to many different people, at different times, and in different places. And
it is the stable plots and motifs which one can detect in stories which
constitute the basis for the concept of the tale-type. Thus, the standard
tale-type index contains generalized descriptions of many such widely-known
and recurrent story types; and the system of comparative folktale study
which is based upon the concept of the tale-type and which utilizes the
standard index of tale types as its basic research tool is one which is
particularly useful for studying the stories of peoples among whom folktales
can, indeed, be said to be traditional because the same story types recur so
frequently. But when stories reported from a given group of people are not
readily identifiable and recognizable as well-known tale-types, and when the
stories which are told by these people do not seem to recur with noticeable
enough frequency that one is enabled to posit that new story types may have
been created and circulated among these people, then this suggests that
among the people in that given group there may be less of a preoccupation
with stories per se and more with the process of telling stories. When one s
such a situation, then it would appear that what he is dealing
with is not so
much a STORY TRADITION, but rather a STORY-TELLING which the total
structures of the story-messages are not predetermined, as would seem to be
the case with a story tradition, but rather one in which the structures of
story-messages are generated during the actual course of the story-telling
process. From the evolving evidence

330

in
comparative folktale research, it appears that in the Balkans it is more
often story-telling that is traditional rather than stories. And this would
explain why stories recorded from Balkan peoples can so infrequently be
fitted easily into the tale-type system and why that system cannot provide
meaningful insights into story-telling in the Balkans.

In
order to clarify these points and to illustrate that they are based upon
what the data reveal, let us consider three Balkan story texts, which I
shall summarize as succinctly as possible. Each of the three stories was
told by a different storyteller, and each was recorded at a different time
and place. All three story texts have appeared in reputable published
collections, and all are characteristic of the kinds of stories which have
been reported from Balkan storytellers during the present century.

Text
one relates a story of a king and his vizier who are both childless and who
both wish for children. They agree that if children of opposite sexes should
happen to be born to them, the two should marry. This does, indeed, come to
pass. But while the girl born to the queen is beautiful and fair, the boy
born to the wife of the vizier is handsome, but black. Determined to get out
of his agreement with the vizier, the king sends the black boy to find God
and to ask Him whether what has been written can be unwritten.

Perplexed by the nature of the task, but duty-bound nevertheless to carry out
the king's command, the boy begins his aimless journey. On the way to his
unknown destination, he encounters first a blind man, later a man who is
perpetually submerged in water up to his neck, and finally a lonely
exile-outlaw, each of whom asks the boy to ask God for a solution to his
misfortune, should the boy be fortunate enough to find God. The boy promises
to do so ; and when he accidentally encounters God, he not only asks Him for
the answer to the king's question, but he also asks what those whom he has
encountered can do to alleviate their misfortunes. On his return journey,
the boy encounters the exile-outlaw, tells him what God has said he must do
to regain the favor of his fellow men, and receives considerable wealth from
the exile-outlaw for having spoken to God for him. To the drowning man, the
boy gives God's answer that there is no solution to his misfortune, for it
is a punishment which he must endure for having been blasphemous. When he
encounters the blind man again, the black boy, in accordance with God's
command, rubs the blind man's eyes with some clay from a nearby hole; the
result of this action is that the blind man is able to see again. In the
process of

331

rubbing the clay on the blind man's eyes, however, the boy notices that the
hand with which he has applied the clay has turned white. Consequently, the
boy rolls his body in the clay; as his entire body turns white, be becomes
aware of the meaning of the king's question and the implications of God's
answer.

Now
both wealthy and white, the boy returns to the city, sets himself up as a
merchant, and manages to attract the attention of the king by deliberately
underselling all the other merchants, who complain to the king. Motivated by
the merchants' complaints, the king visits the boy's shop, but forgets his
mission once he sees the boy, for he is immediately struck by the boy's
appearance and wealth and desires the boy to be the husband of his daughter.
The marriage between the unrecognized boy and the princess is arranged; but
before the wedding, the boy visits his parents, is eventually recognized by
them and by all others. Then what was written is carried out.

In
text two, we are told of a rich man who, at the time of his death, divides
his wealth between his two sons and commands that they never separate. The
elder son, however, decides to part company with his younger brother after
their father's death; while the fortune of the latter grows, that of the
former rapidly dwindles to nothing.

Convinced that it is Luck who has let him down, the elder son sets out to seek
her. On his journey, he encounters first a shepherd who cannot keep his
flock from decreasing in number, then a man whose gluttonous sons treat him
disrespectfully, and finally a river which is unable to breed fish. Each
asks the elder son to ask Luck what can be done about his plight; and the
elder son agrees to do so if he ever does encounter her.

Eventually, the elder son does find Luck, who requests that he remain with her
for four days in order to learn why his fortune has been so bad. Each
morning during the four days, the souls of newborn babies appear outside
Luck's door and clamor for gifts, and each day Luck gives generously of her
great wealth. After the fourth day, however, Luck's store of riches has been
depleted.

With
nothing left to eat or drink and nothing with which to buy provisions, Luck
suggests that she and the elder son seek work. The two earn a scanty wage,
and between them they manage to make enough to afford a simple meal. But
when the newborn souls arrive at Luck's door the next morning, there is
nothing for them but crumbs and crusts. Again, Luck and the elder son seek
work, but they have even less success than they had had the previous day;
the newborn souls which appear the

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following day get nothing at all, for there is nothing for Luck to give to
them.

The
lesson for the elder son is clear, for his newborn soul, too, arrived at
Luck's door on such a day. But he can change his fortune, Luck tells him, if
he can arrange to marry the adopted daughter of his younger brother and if
he remembers never to boast again about his possessions or good fortune.
Before departing from Luck's house, the elder son remembers the shepherd,
the father of the disrespectful boys, and the sterile river; he asks Luck
what they can do to change their fortunes, too. The elder son conveys the
advice which Luck has given him to each of the three on his return journey,
receives rewards from the father and the shepherd, and returns to the house
of his younger brother to request the hand of the brother's adopted daughter
in marriage. The marriage is consummated, and all goes well for the elder
son. But as he prospers, he forgets Luck's warning; when he boasts of the
vastness of his farmlands, he receives reports that many of his land
holdings have been destroyed by natural causes. He remembers Luck's warning,
repents quickly, and his lands prove to be untouched. He prospers and lives
unseparated from his brother for the rest of his days.

In
text three, we are told of an old woman who has a single hen which lays a
single egg each day. But an unattractive old-man neighbor steals the eggs
when the old woman is away. Unable to catch the suspected thief in the act,
the old woman decides to seek advice from the Undying Sun.

On
her way, she meets three old-maid sisters who lament their unmarried state,
a heavily-clad woman who shivers from the cold, a river which can only run
turbid and dark as blood, and a montrous rock which is suspended
precariously, but which cannot fall and be at rest. Each asks the old woman
to describe his plight to the Undying Sun, which she agrees to do when she
encounters him. On her return journey, she conveys the Undying Sun's answers
to those whom she had encountered earlier. She arrives home, and in
accordance with the Undying Sun's promise, the thief has already received
his just desserts. The old woman's eggs never disappear again ; and when she
dies, her hen dies, too.

The
kinds of problems which this group of three story texts presents for the
comparative folktale researcher are typical of the kinds of problems that
confront him repeatedly as he examines story data reported from peoples
living in the Balkans. On the one hand, one cannot help but be

333

struck by many features which are common to, and readily discernible in, these
three texts: the existence of a human conflict, the search for a personified
abstraction, the encounters en route, the requests of those who are
encountered along the way, and the successful completion and effects of this
completion of both the secondary and primary tasks. Furthermore, familiar
stylistic features are found in all three stories: the trebling and
quadrupling of encounters and the happy endings. Motifs well known in other
traditional stories — such as the personification of abstractions, the
reversal of fortune, and the intervention of supernatural beings in the
lives of mortals — are found in all three texts.

At
the same time, however, one cannot help but be aware of significant
differences among the three stories as well. Texts one and two appear to be
more complex than text three, but the relative complexity of the one is
quite different from the other. Furthermore, many of the major motifs found
in one story text are missing from the others. The old woman in text three,
for example, receives no rewards from those whom she encounters and helps;
and the black boy in text one encounters only human agents, while the elder
son and the old woman interact with inanimate objects as well as with other
mortals. Thus, the data create a dilemma from the point of view of those who
feel that these three stories belong together and that they should in some
way be able to be fitted into the widely-used system of tale types which has
come to serve as the basis for comparative folktale study.

When
one looks beyond the obvious and superficial similarities and differences,
however, he begins to discover things which indicate that the question of
whether or not these stories are variants of a common tale type is not just
unanswerable, but is completely irrelevant. For while the three story texts
contain a narrative sequence which can be characterized as conflict, primary
task, search, encounters en route, secondary tasks, confrontation and
successful completion of primary and secondary tasks, and resolution of
conflict, this common narrative sequence in no way constitutes a common
story plot. In text one, the sequence of events which occurs once the boy
sets off on his journey proves to be of primary importance in the story, for
it provides the means by which the storyteller can alleviate the tensions
which arise from the existence of a moral dilemma for which there is no easy
solution. It is the black boy's interactions with the exile-outlaw and the
blind man that make the resolution of the human conflict possible, for it is
only because of the material reward which the boy receives from the
exile-outlaw and the miraculous transforming powers of the clay which God
has instructed the boy to apply to

334

the
blind man's eyes that what is written can, indeed, be carried out. In text
two, on the other hand, the sequence of events which occurs after the elder
son begins his search for Luck seems, at first, to be redundant insofar as
the total structure of the story is concerned. Yet this redundancy is
actually integral to the story, for it serves to reinforce the theme by
mirroring the kinds of violations of a moral code which account for the
elder son's dilemma and motivate him to seek a means of restituting his
state of existence. But in text three, the sequence of events which occurs
after the old woman sets out to find the Undying Sun provides the means by
which the storyteller can exemplify the common kinds of consequences which
result when human beings violate established social norms and when they are
unable to comprehend the reasons for these consequences without the
intercession and help of one who understands them and who values social
equilibrium for its own sake. Thus, one is not dealing, in story texts such
as these, with a common story plot which is simply given different
treatments by different storytellers. Instead, he is confronted with a basic
narrative structure which is manipulated and exploited by different
storytellers in such a way as to enable its manipulators and exploiters to
generate different story-messages whose principal communicative value is
social rather than dramatic.

The
three story texts summarized and discussed above were all recorded from
nonliterate storytellers. Furthermore, those who communicated these stories
to fieldworkers all lived in the Dodecanese Islands, a fact which would
normally lead one to expect the three stories to be much more similar and
much less different than they actually are. [24] But there
are other story texts which have been reported from other parts of the
Balkans in which the same narrative sequence is manipulated and exploited
and in which the discernible differences, as well as the implicit
similarities, are equally noticeable and significant; and these could have
been cited just as easily as those which have been utilized above.
[25] Whatever the choice of examples, however, the result of the
examination is always the same : it is a basic narrative structure, not a
well-known tale

24. The three texts summarized in this paper have been
published in the following works: R. M. Dawkins, Forty-five Stories from
the Dodekanese (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 281-287 (text one), pp. 358-368
(text two); and R. M. Dawkins, Modern Greek Folktales (Oxford, 1953),
pp. 462-465 (text three).

25. See, for example, the story recorded in Lydia
Schischmanoff, Legendes religieuses bulgares (Paris, 1896), pp.
232-238, which contains the same basic narrative structure as that found in
the three stories summarized above, but in which the plot that is generated
from this basic narrative structure is entirely different from the plot of
any one of the three stories discussed in this paper.

335

type,
which is important to the storytellers; and it is the way in which these
basic narrative structures are manipulated and exploited by different
storytellers in the Balkans that makes each story-message unique. To
consider these three stories to be variants of a well-known and common tale
type, as Stith Thompson does in the Second Revision of the standard
tale-type index,
[26] is to ignore significant aspects of the data for no apparent reason
other than to force these data into a classification system of recurrent
tale-types which cannot accommodate them and into which they not only
cannot, but also should not, be fitted.

There
are, then, numerous indications from examinations which have been made of
story data from Balkan peoples that in the Balkans one finds a
story-telling, rather than a story, tradition. And this suggests that in the
Balkans, in contrast to many other parts of Europe, one must approach
stories and storytelling in an entirely different way than he does when he
is dealing with cultures in which it is the stories, rather than the telling
of stories, which is traditional. For in the Balkan area, it would seem that
storytelling is really a creative process rather than a kind of
communicative event during which well-known story plots are re-created and
re-transmitted for their dramatic effects.

In
the introductions to two of his well-known and justly-praised collections of
Modern Greek folktales, the distinguished comparative scholar R. M. Dawkins
draws some inferences from Greek stories which seem to be relevant for other
Balkan peoples as well. "It would seem", Dawkins notes, "that as people grow
out of what is a very primitive state, the folktale has two paths open to
it." Dawkins continues:

If it
[the folktale] is to remain unaltered, then it will fall into the hands of
children and those who minister to them. If it is to continue to interest
older people, then it will change into a kind of oral novel, dealing with
life as known or as imagined by the auditors. But it almost always happens
that the second development is blocked, or rather cut short, by the arrival
of written stories, and the stage so elegantly represented by the
storytelling company of the Decameron rapidly passes. This is what makes
these Dodekanesian stories so interesting: they show us how people, ready
for written stories and not getting them, contrived to make something to
give themselves satisfaction, using only their native resources of wit and
ingenuity. [27]

26. In The Types of the Folktale, Second Revision
(1961), the three stories summarized in this paper are all regarded as
variants of a common story, Type 460B, The Journey in Search of Fortune.
The summary of the story provided by Thompson in the type index corresponds
in many respects to our text two; but the similarities between our texts one
and three and the summary provided by Thompson are minimal.

In
another of his publications, Dawkins develops the principal point that is
implicit in the passage quoted above. These words, too, are worth quoting at
length:

The
brothers Grimm called their book Haus- und Kindermärchen : it would
not occur to anyone to give such a title to most of the Greek stories. The
answer may perhaps be that the Greeks are a people of great natural
intelligence and gifts, who lived for many centuries in a country governed
by a people intellectually very much their inferiors. In their isolated
islands and villages they lived far away from the general current of events
which was all the time carrying the peoples of Europe into new ways of
thought and life. Even in the revolutionary changes at the end of the
eighteenth century Greece could do hardly more than turn in her sleep. For
long the Greeks were ready for something new, but the nation lay always in
chains. In their folktales, we have, it seems, an art-product of a people
naturally progressive and active but with no means of making progress. What
they did was to develop the riches of their own home-grown culture, and the
art of the folktale, in Europe entirely swept away except as an amusement
for children, was in Greece developed until we reach such stories as those I
have placed at the end of the present collection: stories in which the
national philosophy of life shows itself so clearly. [28]

Although some of Dawkins' comments might be readily disputed (such as those
about "natural intelligence" and "intellectual superiority"), they
communicate, it seems to me, certain insights into, and plausible
explanations for, certain realities which are evident in the story data
which have been reported not only from the Greeks, but from other Balkan
peoples as well. For it is true that in other parts of Europe — and
particularly in those countries in which the theoretical bases and methods
of comparative folktale study were first developed — the folktale actually
did fall early into the "hands of children and those who minister to them",
as Dawkins asserts. And this may well be why one can talk of a STORY
TRADITION, but not a STORY-TELLING TRADITION, in Europe in general. For it
is true, as Dawkins suggests, that widespread literacy affects storytelling
because the very models which written stories provide — even for those
people who cannot read them, but who are exposed to and affected by them
nevertheless — are STATIC models; and static models obviously make the STORY
rather than the process of TELLING THE STORY the focus of attention. Finally
— and perhaps most importantly — what studies of comparative researchers
seem to have revealed about storytelling in the Balkans generally is
something which Dawkins came to realize from his study and analysis of Greek
stories; and it is that while in other parts of Europe traditional stories
provide the basis for a kind

of
social interaction and communication through the participation of
taletellers and listeners in the dramatic unfolding of familiar story plots,
in the Balkans storytelling itself is a kind of social interaction and
communicative event during which the story-messages which are generated as a
result of the storyteller's exploitation and manipulation of familiar
narrative structures communicate social values which are traditional.

What
appears to be implicit in the dilemma which has been created by story data
from the Balkan peoples, then, is the fact that if investigators wish to
gain meaningful insights into these data, they can only do so by creating
new investigative models in terms of which the dynamic processes which
appear to be characteristic of story-telling in the Balkans can be better
understood. For researchers to continue to try to study Balkan story data in
terms of a model which was developed for the study of traditional stories
rather than traditional storytelling can only complicate matters and lead to
further delays in initiating studies which have the potential to enlighten
students of Balkan cultures about social and communicative processes, an
intrinsic part of the lives of peoples from which researchers hope to learn
more about human behavior, social relationships, and expressive cultural
phenomena.